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Overview

Guinea Pig Armor Charity Auction refers to an online auction of a scale armor suit for a pet guinea pig that was posted on eBay in June 2013.

Background

On June 11th, 2013, eBay[1] user Sean McCoy (mightys0x) posted an auction titled “Hand-made guinea pig scale-mail and helmet (armor),” featuring several photos of his deceased guinea pig Lucky wearing a custom suit of silver armor (shown below). The bidding for the armor was initially listed at $5 and reached $12,500 within one week.

Notable Developments

On June 13th, Redditor Amorphous_Shadow posted a photograph of Lucky from the eBay page to the /r/funny[5] subreddit, which gained more than 9,200 up votes and 140 comments in the following four days. On June 16th, The Huffington Post[6] published an article about the charity auction, noting that all profits received would be donated to the Metropolitan Guinea Pig Rescue[7] in Virginia. On the following day, Redditor BgGrlsDontCry submitted a photo of Lucky wearing the armor while riding a miniature jet ski (shown below, left) to the /r/photoshopbattles[2] subreddit, where it received over 2,400 up votes and 60 comments in the first 24 hours. In the comments section of the post, many Redditors submitted various photoshopped versions of the photo (shown below, middle, right).

Also on June 17th, Sean McCoy was interviewed in a segment on CNN about the eBay auction (shown below), in which he admitted that Lucky did not enjoy wearing the armor and was only forced to don the garb during a 10-minute photo shoot.

Immediately after the broadcast, Redditor AWildSketchAppeared submitted a screen capture of his guinea pig sketch displayed during the CNN segment (shown below). In less than 24 hours, the post garnered upwards of 38,000 up votes and 730 comments. On the following day, McCoy posted the interview clip to the /r/videos[3] subreddit, where it accumulated over 1,200 up votes and 100 comments in the first 18 hours. Also on July 18th, the news sites Laughing Squid[8] and Time[9] published articles about the charity auction.